From vision to reality: our hydrogen project ELEMENT EINS.
With its partners, Gasunie Deutschland and TenneT, Thyssengas is planning a pilot plant to achieve sector coupling through power-to-gas technology.
Together with the two network operators, we are planning the construction of a pilot power-to-gas plant in Lower Saxony – at 100 megawatts the largest so far in Germany.
The region of East Frisia is the ideal location because huge amounts of wind power from the North Sea already come ashore there. And these quantities will continue to grow.
By 2035, additional wind farms with a power of over 23 gigawatts may be installed. That is the equivalent of 15 atomic power plants. Both a high-performance connection of electricity from wind farms and an efficient gas infrastructure are already in place in the region.
In phases 1 and 2, hydrogen produced from green electricity by ELEMENT EINS, will flow into the existing gas pipelines as a supplement to natural gas. This will already make existing natural gas provision for heating systems and industry more climate-friendly.
At the same time, industries and transportation companies can extract the hydrogen they need for their processes and mobility from the hydrogen connections that will be set up. For example, from hydrogen refuelling stations with tankers. This helps companies work in a more environmentally friendly way – no matter where they are located.
CO₂ from biogas facilities will be chemically combined with the hydrogen produced using green electricity. The resulting synthetic methane can replace fossil natural gas or be mixed with it without limit. When it is burned, only CO₂ that has previously been extracted from the environment is released – the carbon footprint is completely offset. Large-scale power-to-gas facilities: an engineering challenge of the energy transition.
We integrate the nearby cavern storage facilities into the system, which, like huge batteries, will be able to store huge quantities of energy.
In this way, volatile, wind-dependent energy can be turned into a constant flow of power.
L-gas supply is due to be terminated in the foreseeable future. There will be no more deliveries from the Netherlands; L-gas pipelines will become free. We will use the resulting pipeline capacities to transport the hydrogen created in ELEMENT EINS directly to industrial customers in North Rhine-Westphalia. This will improve the climate footprint in one of the most important industrial areas in Europe.